Notes From My Knapsack 8-3-17

Notes From My Knapsack 8-3-17

Jeff Gill

 

Gentrification by any other name…

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In struggling, dated urban neighborhoods, there's a phenomenon that's quite a two-edged sword, called "gentrification."

 

The gentry start to move in, and where the moneyed and well-to-do folk move in, those with less cash move out. Or at least away.

 

So a neighborhood association in a city or an isolated community with some local assets goes to work turning around years of decline in housing stock, jobs, and retail opportunities, and then when they get the restaurants and art galleries and quirky boutique shops, and better-off people move in to renovate, reconstruct, or outright tear down and rebuild homes in the community, you start to see a rise in housing values. Which is good, right?

 

Except when the property tax reassessment goes through, and in general property taxes increase, and suddenly lower income workers have trouble holding onto their homes, and seniors exclaim that their fixed income did not include the prospect of increased payments to the municipality and township and county.

 

Aspen, Colorado and Santa Fe, New Mexico have famously noted this problem in their midst; it's not just an urban core thing. You make a place so "nice," so "cool" that people show up and buy homes and property values shoot up, and suddenly everything costs more, and the long-time locals drift away, retirees chose to cash out and downsize elsewhere, and newer families with very young children don't show up, at least until their kids are older.

 

Your school demographics get weird (as opposed to being able to look at your entering first grade class and having a good idea how many graduates you'll have in twelve years), and you realize all the clerks and servers and staff in the places you frequent in town live out of town . . . far out of town.

 

Is this sounding familiar? Of course it is. Granville has been worrying about this problem for some time, rightly so. But the truth is that we haven't seen any new middle-income housing for quite some time in this area. So not only do down-sizing retirees not tend to stay if they want to continue in their own home (vs. a retiree condo sort of place), younger families find it hard to get into the Granville market. Denison's new professors do not, as a rule, tend to put down roots in the village for the same reason.

 

So I'm curious to see the outcomes and residents in the new small-footprint developments on the east and west sides of the village. We have an assortment of opportunities ahead for making sure this friendly community is not only welcoming to new residents, but that we're also supportive of all the elements that make up a sense of place, the vitality that we want in Granville.

 

One thing I've noticed, learning about the history of our community since my family moved here in 2004, is that we didn't plan to turn into an upper-income enclave, it just sort of happened. We did always highly value education, and that investment paid off unexpectedly, with some sharp-eyed developers like the Murphys and Kents capitalizing on opportunities that were waiting for someone to take a chance. Those paid off, and the village and school district have been in a fencing match with a variety of other developers ever since.

 

Our 2012 Granville Comprehensive Plan is available online, and is worth a little of your time (www.granville.oh.us/comprehensive-plan). Reading it, I'm wondering if it doesn't already need some updating.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's still trying to figure out exactly how the landscape of the village has changed with the new SR 161 corridor, but he's sure it has. Tell him where you think our growth needs to be at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.